© - Steven A. Cerra, introduction copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“Tom Harrell has been called the John Forbes Nash, Jr. of Jazz. Against considerable odds, Harrell has successfully struggled with schizophrenia and become one of the most respected trumpeters and composers of the past 30 years.”
“I like to think of my music as a play of colors over a rhythm” he has said: “it’s like inviting the listeners to visit an art gallery to view an exhibition of various paintings. We express our feelings through timbres and colors within our world of sense, so as to then transcend them and enter the spiritual dimension”. -Tom Harrell in a press release interview with Francesco Martinelli for the forthcoming 2009 BargaJazz Festival, located in Italy’s Apuan Alps [Tuscany].
One of the reasons why the JazzProfiles editorial staff frequently sources Richard Cook and Brian Morton’sThe Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD is that every once in a while these guys nail it. To wit:
“Anyone who has seen Tom Harrell perform … will understand the transformative power of music. When not playing, he stands slumped and bowed, stock-still in what looks like mute agony. When it comes time to take a solo, it is as if an electric charge has passed through him. Harrell is one of the finest harmonic improvisers in Jazz today, a player with a fierce tone who is also capable of playing the most delicate ballad with almost unbearable feeling. [6th Ed.; p. 666, emphasis mine].
One night in the Spring of 2001, I experienced first-hand Tom Harrell’s powerful sensitivity when soloing on ballads. The venue was the new Yoshi’s Jazz Club in Oakland, California’s Jack London Square.
The occasion was a visit to the club to hear Hammond B-3 organist Joey De Francesco who had augmented his then, standing trio of Paul Bollenback [g] and Byron “Wookie” Landham [d] by bringing in Teddy Edwards on tenor saxophone and Tom on trumpet and flugelhorn.
The ballad in question was I Can’t Get Started and I almost winced when Joey called the tune as a feature for Tom as it had become so de rigueur as a part of every Jazz trumpeter’s repertoire that I usually passed over it in recorded version so as not to be burdened by another boring rendition of it.
Ever since trumpeter Bunny Berigan had made this tune a popular hit in the 1930’s it had become the acid test for all trumpet players in much the same way that Coleman Hawkins’ iconic interpretation of the ballad Body and Soul became the ultimate test for all Jazz tenor saxophonists.
But when Tom had finished three improvised choruses on I Can’t Get Started that beautiful spring night at Yoshi’s and wrapped his arms around his horn, and then his body before slumping into a trance at the corner of the stage, you could have heard a pin drop. When the solo finished, what everyone did hear was the collective exhale of all of us in the audience as a measure of relief from the stunned amazement of what we had just experienced.
In a “former life,” I had three years of personal experience working with adult, paranoid schizophrenic patients and their parents in what was then described as an alternative-to-hospitalization setting based around a milieu therapy treatment program.
In non-clinical terms this meant that we were treating these patients in a more open environment, with less reliance on powerful psychotropic drugs while trying to understand the benefit of social interaction in helping these seriously impaired individuals achieve some degree of stability in their condition.
In many ways, it was the most exhausting three years of my life as the work was always 24/7, the “highs” were gratifying, but they were usually offset by excruciatingly and very disappointing “lows,” and, of course, none of these patients ever got better.
With this as a personal background to measure Tom’s achievement against, what he has accomplished given the demands of performing Jazz at the highest levels is a triumph of simply staggering proportions.
Is it any wonder, then, how often fellow musicians and audiences are always deeply touched by Tom’s playing? Perhaps they both intuitively sense the struggle that Tom has had to undergo and endure to bring to them the beauty, passion and fire in his music.
In order to delve further into the phenomena that is both Tom and what makes he and his music so unique, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles has compiled the following, three interviews in an effort to explore how he creates his art in his own words.
The first of these was conducted by Charlie Rose and broadcast on August 20, 2003 during CBS television’s 60 minutes segment entitled A Beautiful Note.
We will then move forward to the editorial staff’s transcription of Josh Jackson’s WBGO Village Vanguard interview with Tom Harrell which took place on April 8, 2008, while Tom’s band was appearing at the club, and then conclude by taking a step backward with Like Night and Day, an article about Tom by Jonathan Eig that appeared in Esquire, December 1998 which is based in part on an interview that took place earlier that year.
While chronologically out of order, this sequence for the interviews and the article may provide a more coherent and comprehensive discussion of Tom’s approach to music.
Let’s begin with Charlie Rose’s 2003 interview with Tom.
© Charlie Rose/CBS copyright protected; all rights reserved.
Tom Harrell, named jazz trumpeter of the year three times by Downbeat Magazine, is known for the gorgeous, intricate melodies he composes.
Seeing Harrell play, it's impossible to believe that he suffers from paranoid schizophrenia - a mental illness so profound that it institutionalizes many of its victims.
Harrell overcomes it with music. Yet the moment he stops playing, his disorder seizes him. Voices materialize and threaten his sense of reality.
But while Harrell appears in full retreat from the world, the music prevents him from losing his place. And when horn returns to mouth, the voices vanish. It’s the only time you don’t see the signs of his illness. Correspondent Charlie Rose reports.
Take him away from the creative process and Harrell’s behavior changes radically.
In fact, the schizophrenia makes something as ordinary as having our soundman put a microphone on him an ordeal. But soon, the moment passes.
“As long as I take the medicine now, I can stay on an even keel, and then I'm able to function,” says Harrell, who communicates musically, not verbally - which is all his band members need to follow him during performances.
Still, they have all borne witness to his paranoia.
“I think we see it all the time. He doesn't announce it, say, ‘I'm sitting, I'm hearing voices,’ you know. They'll be sudden changes for no apparent reason,” says pianist Xavier Davis.
“But maybe someone mentioned someone or whispered something just out of earshot, and he heard that as something like, ‘Tom, get off the stage. You suck.’ You know, like just something that was never said. And so, maybe he’ll just take a short solo because he thinks people don’t want to hear him play.”
But Harrell wasn't always like this, says his older sister, Sue Abrahamson.
“He was good-spirited, creative,” says Abrahamson. “He had friends that he would do things with and hang out with. And seemed pretty normal.”
Normal, but with a genius IQ, Harrell starting playing the trumpet at the age of eight. When he went off to college at 18, his sister received a call that he had tried to commit suicide.
“That was the first sign that there were problems,” says Abrahamson.How could a seemingly normal little boy with a normal childhood travel from happiness to despair so suddenly?“
"We don't know what causes the illness,” says Dr. Eric Marcus, a New York psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He’s familiar with Harrell's history and is an expert on schizophrenia.
"A paranoid schizophrenic is someone with schizophrenia whose major manifestation of illness is the hallucinated voice and/or belief that people are out to get him - that they are targeting him in some way,” says Marcus.
When Harrell was in his 20s, those voices ordered him to walk through a window after he had some orange juice.
I come in and I see blood all over the rug, and I say, ‘What happened,?’ And he said that when he drank the orange juice, the voices told him to go out the window,” recalls Abrahamson. “And so he had to break the window to get out. So that's how he got cut.”
The glass shattered, but it kept him inside.
Harrell's days are spent practicing and composing. He writes his scores by hand. The notes are neat, logical, orderly - not what you'd expect from someone locked in the vise of schizophrenia.
Because of his disorder, Harrell is tough to interview. But when the topic is music, he takes complexity in stride.
That's beautiful, how you can see the visual art. I mean it's great when the different art forms can influence each other. The visual arts and now the musical arts,” says Harrell, on the crossover between impressionist painting and jazz.
But when the talk turns to Harrell's illness, he becomes uneasy. He takes three medications that stave off depression, reduce panic attacks, and sedate him. Without them, he turns psychotic. Even with them, performing is an act of will.
“If I take the medicine, then the voices … I don't hear anything,” he says.
And if he doesn't take the medicine?
I don't know. It's just better if I do,” he says.
Marcus says it’s astounding that Harrell is able to reach the level of creativity he reaches as a musician.
Astounding, number one. Number two, heroic - in its most true form,” says Marcus. “He has to face demons that you and I can only imagine.”
But it's not only music that holds Harrell together. It's Angela Harrell, his wife of 11 years. Angela was researching a documentary for Japanese television on creativity and the brain, which led her to tape an interview with Tom.
“He started to talk. And then he said, ‘I better go back and practice,’ and ‘That tape is making me very nervous,’" recalls Angela. “He asked me to stop the tape. And then he started to get all flustered. And he said, ‘I don't belong in the music business. I better quit. I don't have the personality to be in the music business.’”
But from this unpromising beginning came marriage.
“I think I was drawn to him immediately,” says Angela. “He was intriguing. He was mysterious. And it was sort of like unfolding, you know, petal by petal. I wanted to know this person. But the more I knew about him, the more I got to like him … This purity of spirit. He's a beautiful person. There's nothing not to like about the guy.”
Although their devotion is mutual, getting pictures of them together is hit or miss. Tom wouldn't take a walk with Angela because, he said, somebody might see him.
Was there ever a moment during their courtship when Angela asked herself, “Wait a minute, what am I doing here?”
“I didn't have these thoughts until some of the problems occurred, some of the crises that we've experienced,” admits Angela.
Those crises included sudden disappearances, rapidly changing mood swings, a suicide attempt, and a toxic reaction to a medication that almost killed Harrell.
“Those are times when I've asked myself some of those questions,” says Angela. “But never, ‘What am I doing?’ But always, ‘What can we do, and is there hope?’"
She’s says that she’s always come to the conclusion that you can’t give up. "You just have to keep trying,” she says.
Trying is one thing, but succeeding is another. How to explain the mysterious explosion that blasts through Harrell's illness and transports him to the highest level of his art?
A clue may come from Harrell himself: "I don't know whether I'm playing the music or whether the music is playing me."
Harrell's latest CD will be released this September.
Josh Jackson’s WBGO Village Vanguard interview with Tom Harrell 4.8.2008
© - Steven A. Cerra, transcription is copyright protected; all rights reserved.
John Jackson [WBGO Announcer]: “Tom Harrell, thank you for being a part of our Live at the Village Vanguard Concert Series. It’s a real pleasure. I’m amazed Tom at hearing your music, you’re most recent recording has come out in January [2008], and it’s another recording that’s all Tom Harrell compositions, it’s the quintet that will feature here at the Village Vanguard; it’s the second record that you’ve done with this group in particular, and I just wonder how is it that you are able to churn this music out so consistently and so beautifully?”
Tom Harrell: “I try to keep it up everyday. It’s like anything else, you can achieve a flow if you do it all the time , so it’s like a door that opens everyday that I can turn to for inspiration of the music.”
WBGO: Tom, we should inform our radio listeners who may not be accustomed to hearing you speak that you have been diagnosed as a schizophrenic and you’ve been living with this condition now for nearly four decades. Is that correct?
TOM: Well, yeah, I guess I do have it; the scary part is there are times when it’s difficult to see reality as I have tenuous reality contact. It is a chemical imbalance so I take medicine for it. But the medicine works so I don’t have the extreme fear that I would have from the condition. In a way, it sort of forces me to be by myself because I don’t always know how to approach social situations. Society keeps changing very rapidly and modes of communication are changing, too. So it seems like I’m not always able to fit into social groups, but playing the trumpet itself kind of forces you into solitude in a sense because being an artist imposes a certain amount of solitude on the artist. Although music is probably the most social … [of the arts]. I was going to go into graphic arts but I was frighten by the solitude that was going to impose on me. But then I realized later that this was also the case with music as well, especially if you spend a lot of time composing. … But Ibsen does say that art is a “Garden of Solitude.”
WBGO: And in some sense, the artistic process, as you say, is a lonely one sometimes. It can be a lonely one in terms of being by yourself, but you are not necessarily alone. There’s a difference there, isn’t there?
TOM: Well yes, because you are always aware that you can bring it to other people and that you are doing something with the ultimate goal of sharing it with people so as I think of Buddha sometimes they said that he went into the mountains to meditate and found this beautiful thing within himself. He wanted to share what he found with other people. So musical composition is like doing that too. I think that ultimately it becomes like a religious experience because those idea that you have when you are by yourself come from somewhere beyond yourself that you want to share with others. Sometimes I hear something in my mind and I want to write it down and as I do this I become more and more inspired.
There are moments when you improvising, too, and you become aware of a sensation that Lester Bowie [Chicago Art Ensemble] once described as: “I play the trumpet, but sometimes the trumpet plays me.” Sometimes when I am playing the trumpet I get this magical feeling that the notes are coming from somewhere else. Sometimes when I’m playing, I might aim for something and then something else comes out. It shows the subconscious at work. Too me, I relate psychiatry and psychology to religion, in the sense that the subconscious is a way for God to speak to us, because it is our Life force. Our entire mind is a Life force and in a sense each person is like a universe. But we have what came before from our ancestors which includes all creation: everything from the beginning of the Universe to what we’ve experienced since we were born. Sometimes what we’ve experienced from out environment I have to fight with in order to be creative. Like the Bhagavad-Gita, in a literal sense is built around a battle between two armies, but it is also sometimes thought of as a symbolic representation of the battle that occurs in one’s mind between good and evil. So I am aware that I have an inner battle, but that’s part of shedding some of the negative aspects of your conditioning and try to be positive in your creativity.
WBGO: I’d like to talk about the process. Right now, Tom Harrell, you and I are sitting in a room in your apartment and there’s keyboards, piano, a drum set; what’s a day-in-the-life of you sitting down and writing music?
TOM: Right now [said laughingly], it’s mostly about playing music. Sometimes I have to sacrifice a certain amount of writing and piano playing to practicing the trumpet because it is such a difficult instrument. So I try to practice as much as I can, at least four hours a day, or even more.
If ideas come to me while I’m practicing, I’ll try to write them down, even if it’s only a fragment, but if I’m really working on getting my technique together right before a concert or a series of concerts, I might not even write down everything I hear. The trumpet basically comes first because I’m known mainly as a trumpet player. So I usually spend more time writing when I have long stretches between concerts. I get into a two-day cycle when I stay up all night and sleep in the next day. It takes away from my trumpet chops, but during these long breaks, I do try to write everyday. I have note books that I keep everything from fragments to ideas in.
WBGO: When you write for this quintet, do you write like Duke Ellington would write; do you write the part for that person?
TOM: Yes, I write for each individual. I try to find things that will make them excited. What makes it worthwhile for me is when the music comes alive while we are performing. That’s one of the beautiful things about Duke Ellington was that he wrote for each individual. That’s my basic motivation is to make people happy.
WBGO: That’s Prana. What is Prana?
TOM: It’s a Life Force. Its what keeps our lives basically moving. It’s part of Yoga breathing and I use it as a way to calm myself.
WBGO: I can imagine that for someone seeing you perform for the very first time, there could be a massive misunderstanding if they didn’t know something abput you before they came to the show. Because you seem to be completely engaged when the trumpet is in your mouth, and then when your solo is gone, you sort of move off to the side of the stage and are not making any kind of eye contact with any of the audience or the band members. Do you think that it is a massive mis-characterization to say that you are not engaged at that point?
TOM: I try to keep the engagement when I am playing, but when I’m not playing it is important, too. I mean that’s the whole reason for living. Long ago, I was introduced to the idea of keeping a groove going along with everything else in life that you are trying to do. I’m still trying to apply that idea. Someone once said: even when you are not practicing, you are practicing. While you are going for a walk you are learning about life; or reading a book – same thing. You can learn something everyday that could apply to your life whether it is musical or non-musical. As a musician, I tend to see everything in terms of music. But everything is related to cosmology and related to it.
WBGO: Tom, thanks for joining us.
TOM: Thank you; nice talking to you.
WBGO: We are looking forward now to hearing you and the quintet at The Village Vanguard.
“We have been criticized for pointing out that he has battled psychiatric illness for many years. It does not define him, either personally or creatively, but schizophrenia has been a shaping influence for much of his adult life. Schizophrenics never make any bones about it, and Harrell has even been known to joke about his condition, once commenting as he entered a hotel suite that there was a room for each of his personalities.” Richard Cook & Brian Morton’s The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD [Loc. cit.].
As the years have moved along in Tom’s career, what was once quietly acknowledge and accepted among the community of musicians in which he performed, became a disclosed condition to the public in general through television interviews like the one with Charlie Rose on CBS’ 60 minutes and magazine articles such as the following one entitled Like Night and Day by Jonathan Eig which appeared in Esquire, December 1998.
© copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“TOM HARRELL, dressed all in black, stands in a dark corner of a crowded Chicago nightclub. Sometimes he prefers a closet, but tonight the corner will do. He's clearing the voices from his head, trying to stay cool. Don't worry, he tells himself over and over, be positive...believe in yourself...count your blessings....The banalities don't stick, but they help push aside the voices a bit, and now he is ready to go to work.
Harrell shuffles out of the darkness and onto the stage, where the four members of his band wait, and he begins shaking. His eyebrows twitch. His lips smack. He stares at the ground, trying hard not to make eye contact with his audience. He doesn't want to give the voices or the hallucinations a chance to pop back into his head. "I apologize for my lack of charisma," he once told a club full of people. As he raises his trumpet, the golden spotlight strikes stars on the horn's bell. Even as he puts the cold mouthpiece to his lips, his twitching never quite stops. He takes a deep breath, and for one frozen moment, all is quiet. Tranquility hangs on an unplayed note.
The trumpeter begins to blow, playing silky ribbons of sixteenth notes that rise and fall. Behind him, the band beats a latin-jazz rhythm. Then he tosses in a handful of slower, cloudier notes that curl and fade away.
Harrell is one of the finest jazz trumpeters in the world. He is also schizophrenic. Backstage after the set, he is impossible to talk to. He sits alone on a ragged sofa in a small dressing room. His wife, Angela, ushers me into the room and makes the introduction. I try small talk, but he is unable to speak. His head shakes, and his lips move as if he's trying to release trapped words.
"Jonathan plays the trumpet," Angela tells her husband, trying to break the ice.
I tell him that I would like to interview him at his home in New York.
He tries again to form sounds. Nothing. Fifteen seconds of silence pass, and I am tempted several times to fill the empty space with babble.
"Bring your trumpet," he finally says.
I arrive on a hot Friday afternoon in August, trumpet case slung over my shoulder. Harrell lives in Washington Heights, and his apartment has a gorgeous view of the George Washington Bridge, the Hudson River, and the Palisades. But on the day of my visit, as on most days, the curtains are drawn. The place smells of grilled steak, which Harrell eats, entirely without seasoning, at least once a day. He puts away his dishes and walks slowly out of the kitchen to shake my hand and lead me to a chair. Most of the walls are lined with dark wooden cabinets that hold Harrell's music. Each drawer contains the score for a different composition, and by a quick count, there are at least two hundred drawers.
After saying hello, Harrell vanishes for fifteen minutes, then suddenly joins me at a darkwood dining room table. He appears much as he did in the club: nervous, shaky, and reluctant or unable to communicate. He is dressed all in black, same as always, and he is even taller than I remembered. His shaggy hair and beard have begun turning gray. His lips are purple and moist, like thin slices of raw sirloin, and his pale-blue eyes match almost perfectly the clear sky beyond his curtained windows.
Even though there are no buildings within sight of the apartment, Harrell sometimes believes he is being watched. At other times, he believes his home has been bugged. Quite often, he hears voices. Tom Harrell did this to somebody. Tom Harrell did that to somebody, they say, and those voices sometimes hurl him deep into a ravine of guilt and depression. When the voices speak, or when visual hallucinations beset him, his shaking worsens. Angela advises me not to use a tape recorder during the interview and to be prepared to come back another day if he doesn't want to talk.
Tom Harrell was born in 1946 in Urbana, Illinois, and grew up in Los Altos, California. His father taught business psychology at Stanford, and his mother worked as a statistician. Tom topped his father's IQ of 146, and he early on showed extraordinary talent in music and art. By the time he was eight, he was writing and illustrating his own children's books, which revealed the work of a precocious, original mind. In one book, young Tom told the story of a little boy who goes to a doctor for treatment of a mosquito bite and gets diagnosed with 'scissor-birds, dog-turtles' and other animal hybrids that he invented.
It was his father's constant whistling and his impressive jazz record collection that inspired Tom to begin playing the trumpet. By the time he turned thirteen, he was jamming with professional bands around the Bay Area. When he was seventeen, he went off to Stanford, and it was at about that time that his parents and sister began to notice that the buoyancy was draining from his personality. He became surly and aloof, a social misfit, and, at one very low point, he tried to kill himself.
When he was in his early twenties, Harrell was diagnosed with schizo-affective disorder, which combines the paranoia of schizophrenia with the wild mood swings of manic depression, and he was given drugs to help control the condition. The medication slowed his speech, gave him headaches, and robbed him of sleep, but he was able to carry on as a professional musician, working his way from band to band.
Only in the world of jazz, where abnormal behavior has always been the tradition, could Harrell fit so nicely. After all, Charles Mingus spent time in the mental ward at Bellevue, Bud Powell did his own tour of psychiatric hospitals, the great Sun Ra thought he came from another planet, and Thelonious Monk probably did.
Harrell has recorded a dozen albums for small record companies. But in the past two years, since he signed a contract with the RCA Victor label, he's begun to gain recognition outside the hardcore group of fans who had previously followed his work. The readers of Down Beat recently voted him the world's best trumpet player. With his major-label releases, most recently The Art of Rhythm, even the mainstream press has begun to take note.
"Pure melodic genius," declared one discerning newsmagazine.
And the melodies are the genius's own. Harrell prefers his original compositions to standards, He warns listeners to work as they listen, to attempt to understand the feelings behind his songs.
The musicians who have worked with Harrell report some odd moments as well as magical ones. In an airport, if the hustle and bustle become too much for him, he might wander off to a quiet spot in a parking garage and blow his trumpet until the noises in his head hush. Sometimes he will hear a chord in the hum of the refrigerator or the engine of a passing jet and work the rest of the day writing a composition based on what he has heard. Once, on a cab ride in Los Angeles with bandmate Gregory Tardy, Harrell began weeping uncontrollably because he was struck by the beauty of a tune on the cabbies radio. Tardy can't remember the song, but he says it was some Top Forty pop number he had heard a hundred times and never paid attention to before.
Angela travels with Harrell and helps keep him from getting distracted. His need for intense periods of quiet concentration guides almost every moment of his life. When he has a gig, he won't leave his apartment or his hotel room until it is time to play. He sends Angela to do the sound check and bring him food. Harrell says he feels awfully alone at times. He sometimes thinks life would be easier if he were to work full-time as a composer and arranger, because he wouldn't have to face the pressures of travel and three-set-a-night gigs. But Angela and his band-mates account for almost all the human companionship he's got, and he can't stand the thought of being isolated.
Once, a few years ago, after his medicine caused a toxic reaction and nearly killed him, Harrell stopped taking it. The results were fascinating and frightening. His moods changed more quickly and furiously than ever, from happy to sad, confident to insecure. His posture improved, his tremors vanished, and he became something close to affable. He would buy bags of groceries and leave them in front of his neighbors' doors as anonymous gifts. On the bandstand, when his turn came to solo, he would stun his audiences by scat singing in falsetto. His emergent personality was wonderful, and it was terrifying. He would go for five-hour walks in the middle of the night, and he would frequently leave all the taps in the apartment running, in tribute, he said, to the Water God.
Harrell never quite looks me in the eye. He stares at his lap, hops quickly from one thought to the next, and raises his eyelids only briefly. At one point, he says he doesn't think he should go on speaking to me, because he feels tremendous guilt for not having been born black. Jazz is black music, he says, and it seems unfair for a white man to be celebrated for his work. He can't separate himself from these thoughts, and all my attempts to change the subject are in vain. He begins to cry, and he lets the tears roll into his beard. He excuses himself, and twenty minutes later he returns with a tall glass of milk and acts as if nothing had happened. He glances at my trumpet case and a book of music paper I have with me. "Do you compose?" he asks.
"No," I say. "But my teacher wants me to write a new melody based on the chords to 'Night and Day.' "
He looks at my weak attempt.
"Oh, this is really nice," he says. His voice is high and pinched in the throat, and my mind scrambles from one television cartoon character to another, trying to place it. "You have some nice ideas here,"
He is incapable of criticizing, except when it applies to himself, but we are off and running, at least, talking about flat nines and flat flat nines and some other nines I pretend to understand. He is most comfortable on the subject of music, about the lovely way Louis Armstrong used scat singing to show that words were not needed to communicate feelings, about how Miles Davis played many of the same rhythms as Armstrong yet cast them in darker colors, and about Charlie Parker's belief that great music is born when musicians forget their long hours of study at the moment of creation.
"You merge with the infinite and transcend your ego," he says, describing how it feels to play. He takes a long, shaky pause. "Sometimes it seems to flow without any conscious effort."
All music has the human cry at its base, he says, and even the saddest songs can lead people out of the darkness of depression. "I think the more emotion you experience, the more you can bring to the music," he says. "Some people say you don't have to suffer to play music...." He takes another long pause. "I don't know, but, umm..." His eyebrows begin leaping wildly, his mouth moves in silence, and his head shakes side to side so much I begin to think he's stable now and the whole room is moving behind him. "That's a really difficult question. You don't want to be self-destructive. At the same time, sadness is a part of everyone's life, and music can express the sadness people are feeling and bring them together. You shouldn't hide from your feelings.
"Sometimes, I guess when I get paranoid, it can make me distracted," he continues. "But sometimes, if I feel really depressed, it can give me humility, which makes it sometimes easier to concentrate, which makes it easier to transcend my ego. I may be drawn to worrying because it's a form of excitement."
When Harrell runs out of words, he takes me into his music studio, a sound-proof extra bedroom with double-paned windows and closed curtains. There are dozens of tubes of lip balm and hundreds of sheets of handwritten music scattered about. He sits at his keyboard and stares at a work in progress for trumpet and strings.
"Play it," Angela gently requests.
The opening chords are very sad. The music moves slowly, by half steps and subtle shades. The key signature is in a constant state of flux, like a chameleon moving from plant to wall, sunlight to shade. Harrell's spine curls into a question mark. He stares straight ahead at the lightly penciled notes, concentrating intensely as his milk-white fingers move slowly over the keys. I hear dark holes without bottom and chaos brought barely under the control of the composer's hand. This is the source of the strength in Harrell's music. He shows us the darkness and confusion, and he makes beauty from it.
Harrell is at peace now. When he finishes, he looks at me and holds his gaze.
"That was so sad," I say.
He smiles, for the first time.
"Thanks," he says. He takes a long pause. The twitching has almost vanished.
"Wanna do 'Night and Day'?" he asks.”
To be continued in Tom Harrell Part 2 – A Retrospective and The Recordings
“Tom Harrell has been called the John Forbes Nash, Jr. of Jazz. Against considerable odds, Harrell has successfully struggled with schizophrenia and become one of the most respected trumpeters and composers of the past 30 years.”
“I like to think of my music as a play of colors over a rhythm” he has said: “it’s like inviting the listeners to visit an art gallery to view an exhibition of various paintings. We express our feelings through timbres and colors within our world of sense, so as to then transcend them and enter the spiritual dimension”. -Tom Harrell in a press release interview with Francesco Martinelli for the forthcoming 2009 BargaJazz Festival, located in Italy’s Apuan Alps [Tuscany].
One of the reasons why the JazzProfiles editorial staff frequently sources Richard Cook and Brian Morton’sThe Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD is that every once in a while these guys nail it. To wit:“Anyone who has seen Tom Harrell perform … will understand the transformative power of music. When not playing, he stands slumped and bowed, stock-still in what looks like mute agony. When it comes time to take a solo, it is as if an electric charge has passed through him. Harrell is one of the finest harmonic improvisers in Jazz today, a player with a fierce tone who is also capable of playing the most delicate ballad with almost unbearable feeling. [6th Ed.; p. 666, emphasis mine].
One night in the Spring of 2001, I experienced first-hand Tom Harrell’s powerful sensitivity when soloing on ballads. The venue was the new Yoshi’s Jazz Club in Oakland, California’s Jack London Square.
The occasion was a visit to the club to hear Hammond B-3 organist Joey De Francesco who had augmented his then, standing trio of Paul Bollenback [g] and Byron “Wookie” Landham [d] by bringing in Teddy Edwards on tenor saxophone and Tom on trumpet and flugelhorn.
The ballad in question was I Can’t Get Started and I almost winced when Joey called the tune as a feature for Tom as it had become so de rigueur as a part of every Jazz trumpeter’s repertoire that I usually passed over it in recorded version so as not to be burdened by another boring rendition of it.
Ever since trumpeter Bunny Berigan had made this tune a popular hit in the 1930’s it had become the acid test for all trumpet players in much the same way that Coleman Hawkins’ iconic interpretation of the ballad Body and Soul became the ultimate test for all Jazz tenor saxophonists.
But when Tom had finished three improvised choruses on I Can’t Get Started that beautiful spring night at Yoshi’s and wrapped his arms around his horn, and then his body before slumping into a trance at the corner of the stage, you could have heard a pin drop. When the solo finished, what everyone did hear was the collective exhale of all of us in the audience as a measure of relief from the stunned amazement of what we had just experienced.In a “former life,” I had three years of personal experience working with adult, paranoid schizophrenic patients and their parents in what was then described as an alternative-to-hospitalization setting based around a milieu therapy treatment program.
In non-clinical terms this meant that we were treating these patients in a more open environment, with less reliance on powerful psychotropic drugs while trying to understand the benefit of social interaction in helping these seriously impaired individuals achieve some degree of stability in their condition.
In many ways, it was the most exhausting three years of my life as the work was always 24/7, the “highs” were gratifying, but they were usually offset by excruciatingly and very disappointing “lows,” and, of course, none of these patients ever got better.
With this as a personal background to measure Tom’s achievement against, what he has accomplished given the demands of performing Jazz at the highest levels is a triumph of simply staggering proportions.
Is it any wonder, then, how often fellow musicians and audiences are always deeply touched by Tom’s playing? Perhaps they both intuitively sense the struggle that Tom has had to undergo and endure to bring to them the beauty, passion and fire in his music.
In order to delve further into the phenomena that is both Tom and what makes he and his music so unique, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles has compiled the following, three interviews in an effort to explore how he creates his art in his own words.
The first of these was conducted by Charlie Rose and broadcast on August 20, 2003 during CBS television’s 60 minutes segment entitled A Beautiful Note.
We will then move forward to the editorial staff’s transcription of Josh Jackson’s WBGO Village Vanguard interview with Tom Harrell which took place on April 8, 2008, while Tom’s band was appearing at the club, and then conclude by taking a step backward with Like Night and Day, an article about Tom by Jonathan Eig that appeared in Esquire, December 1998 which is based in part on an interview that took place earlier that year.
While chronologically out of order, this sequence for the interviews and the article may provide a more coherent and comprehensive discussion of Tom’s approach to music.
Let’s begin with Charlie Rose’s 2003 interview with Tom.© Charlie Rose/CBS copyright protected; all rights reserved.
Tom Harrell, named jazz trumpeter of the year three times by Downbeat Magazine, is known for the gorgeous, intricate melodies he composes.
Seeing Harrell play, it's impossible to believe that he suffers from paranoid schizophrenia - a mental illness so profound that it institutionalizes many of its victims.
Harrell overcomes it with music. Yet the moment he stops playing, his disorder seizes him. Voices materialize and threaten his sense of reality.
But while Harrell appears in full retreat from the world, the music prevents him from losing his place. And when horn returns to mouth, the voices vanish. It’s the only time you don’t see the signs of his illness. Correspondent Charlie Rose reports.
Take him away from the creative process and Harrell’s behavior changes radically.
In fact, the schizophrenia makes something as ordinary as having our soundman put a microphone on him an ordeal. But soon, the moment passes.
“As long as I take the medicine now, I can stay on an even keel, and then I'm able to function,” says Harrell, who communicates musically, not verbally - which is all his band members need to follow him during performances.
Still, they have all borne witness to his paranoia.
“I think we see it all the time. He doesn't announce it, say, ‘I'm sitting, I'm hearing voices,’ you know. They'll be sudden changes for no apparent reason,” says pianist Xavier Davis.
“But maybe someone mentioned someone or whispered something just out of earshot, and he heard that as something like, ‘Tom, get off the stage. You suck.’ You know, like just something that was never said. And so, maybe he’ll just take a short solo because he thinks people don’t want to hear him play.”
But Harrell wasn't always like this, says his older sister, Sue Abrahamson.
“He was good-spirited, creative,” says Abrahamson. “He had friends that he would do things with and hang out with. And seemed pretty normal.”Normal, but with a genius IQ, Harrell starting playing the trumpet at the age of eight. When he went off to college at 18, his sister received a call that he had tried to commit suicide.
“That was the first sign that there were problems,” says Abrahamson.How could a seemingly normal little boy with a normal childhood travel from happiness to despair so suddenly?“
"We don't know what causes the illness,” says Dr. Eric Marcus, a New York psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He’s familiar with Harrell's history and is an expert on schizophrenia.
"A paranoid schizophrenic is someone with schizophrenia whose major manifestation of illness is the hallucinated voice and/or belief that people are out to get him - that they are targeting him in some way,” says Marcus.
When Harrell was in his 20s, those voices ordered him to walk through a window after he had some orange juice.
I come in and I see blood all over the rug, and I say, ‘What happened,?’ And he said that when he drank the orange juice, the voices told him to go out the window,” recalls Abrahamson. “And so he had to break the window to get out. So that's how he got cut.”
The glass shattered, but it kept him inside.
Harrell's days are spent practicing and composing. He writes his scores by hand. The notes are neat, logical, orderly - not what you'd expect from someone locked in the vise of schizophrenia.
Because of his disorder, Harrell is tough to interview. But when the topic is music, he takes complexity in stride.
That's beautiful, how you can see the visual art. I mean it's great when the different art forms can influence each other. The visual arts and now the musical arts,” says Harrell, on the crossover between impressionist painting and jazz.
But when the talk turns to Harrell's illness, he becomes uneasy. He takes three medications that stave off depression, reduce panic attacks, and sedate him. Without them, he turns psychotic. Even with them, performing is an act of will.
“If I take the medicine, then the voices … I don't hear anything,” he says.
And if he doesn't take the medicine?
I don't know. It's just better if I do,” he says.
Marcus says it’s astounding that Harrell is able to reach the level of creativity he reaches as a musician.Astounding, number one. Number two, heroic - in its most true form,” says Marcus. “He has to face demons that you and I can only imagine.”
But it's not only music that holds Harrell together. It's Angela Harrell, his wife of 11 years. Angela was researching a documentary for Japanese television on creativity and the brain, which led her to tape an interview with Tom.
“He started to talk. And then he said, ‘I better go back and practice,’ and ‘That tape is making me very nervous,’" recalls Angela. “He asked me to stop the tape. And then he started to get all flustered. And he said, ‘I don't belong in the music business. I better quit. I don't have the personality to be in the music business.’”
But from this unpromising beginning came marriage.
“I think I was drawn to him immediately,” says Angela. “He was intriguing. He was mysterious. And it was sort of like unfolding, you know, petal by petal. I wanted to know this person. But the more I knew about him, the more I got to like him … This purity of spirit. He's a beautiful person. There's nothing not to like about the guy.”Although their devotion is mutual, getting pictures of them together is hit or miss. Tom wouldn't take a walk with Angela because, he said, somebody might see him.
Was there ever a moment during their courtship when Angela asked herself, “Wait a minute, what am I doing here?”
“I didn't have these thoughts until some of the problems occurred, some of the crises that we've experienced,” admits Angela.
Those crises included sudden disappearances, rapidly changing mood swings, a suicide attempt, and a toxic reaction to a medication that almost killed Harrell.
“Those are times when I've asked myself some of those questions,” says Angela. “But never, ‘What am I doing?’ But always, ‘What can we do, and is there hope?’"
She’s says that she’s always come to the conclusion that you can’t give up. "You just have to keep trying,” she says.
Trying is one thing, but succeeding is another. How to explain the mysterious explosion that blasts through Harrell's illness and transports him to the highest level of his art?
A clue may come from Harrell himself: "I don't know whether I'm playing the music or whether the music is playing me."
Harrell's latest CD will be released this September.
Josh Jackson’s WBGO Village Vanguard interview with Tom Harrell 4.8.2008
© - Steven A. Cerra, transcription is copyright protected; all rights reserved.
John Jackson [WBGO Announcer]: “Tom Harrell, thank you for being a part of our Live at the Village Vanguard Concert Series. It’s a real pleasure. I’m amazed Tom at hearing your music, you’re most recent recording has come out in January [2008], and it’s another recording that’s all Tom Harrell compositions, it’s the quintet that will feature here at the Village Vanguard; it’s the second record that you’ve done with this group in particular, and I just wonder how is it that you are able to churn this music out so consistently and so beautifully?”
Tom Harrell: “I try to keep it up everyday. It’s like anything else, you can achieve a flow if you do it all the time , so it’s like a door that opens everyday that I can turn to for inspiration of the music.”
WBGO: Tom, we should inform our radio listeners who may not be accustomed to hearing you speak that you have been diagnosed as a schizophrenic and you’ve been living with this condition now for nearly four decades. Is that correct?
TOM: Well, yeah, I guess I do have it; the scary part is there are times when it’s difficult to see reality as I have tenuous reality contact. It is a chemical imbalance so I take medicine for it. But the medicine works so I don’t have the extreme fear that I would have from the condition. In a way, it sort of forces me to be by myself because I don’t always know how to approach social situations. Society keeps changing very rapidly and modes of communication are changing, too. So it seems like I’m not always able to fit into social groups, but playing the trumpet itself kind of forces you into solitude in a sense because being an artist imposes a certain amount of solitude on the artist. Although music is probably the most social … [of the arts]. I was going to go into graphic arts but I was frighten by the solitude that was going to impose on me. But then I realized later that this was also the case with music as well, especially if you spend a lot of time composing. … But Ibsen does say that art is a “Garden of Solitude.”
WBGO: And in some sense, the artistic process, as you say, is a lonely one sometimes. It can be a lonely one in terms of being by yourself, but you are not necessarily alone. There’s a difference there, isn’t there?TOM: Well yes, because you are always aware that you can bring it to other people and that you are doing something with the ultimate goal of sharing it with people so as I think of Buddha sometimes they said that he went into the mountains to meditate and found this beautiful thing within himself. He wanted to share what he found with other people. So musical composition is like doing that too. I think that ultimately it becomes like a religious experience because those idea that you have when you are by yourself come from somewhere beyond yourself that you want to share with others. Sometimes I hear something in my mind and I want to write it down and as I do this I become more and more inspired.
There are moments when you improvising, too, and you become aware of a sensation that Lester Bowie [Chicago Art Ensemble] once described as: “I play the trumpet, but sometimes the trumpet plays me.” Sometimes when I am playing the trumpet I get this magical feeling that the notes are coming from somewhere else. Sometimes when I’m playing, I might aim for something and then something else comes out. It shows the subconscious at work. Too me, I relate psychiatry and psychology to religion, in the sense that the subconscious is a way for God to speak to us, because it is our Life force. Our entire mind is a Life force and in a sense each person is like a universe. But we have what came before from our ancestors which includes all creation: everything from the beginning of the Universe to what we’ve experienced since we were born. Sometimes what we’ve experienced from out environment I have to fight with in order to be creative. Like the Bhagavad-Gita, in a literal sense is built around a battle between two armies, but it is also sometimes thought of as a symbolic representation of the battle that occurs in one’s mind between good and evil. So I am aware that I have an inner battle, but that’s part of shedding some of the negative aspects of your conditioning and try to be positive in your creativity.
WBGO: I’d like to talk about the process. Right now, Tom Harrell, you and I are sitting in a room in your apartment and there’s keyboards, piano, a drum set; what’s a day-in-the-life of you sitting down and writing music?
TOM: Right now [said laughingly], it’s mostly about playing music. Sometimes I have to sacrifice a certain amount of writing and piano playing to practicing the trumpet because it is such a difficult instrument. So I try to practice as much as I can, at least four hours a day, or even more.
If ideas come to me while I’m practicing, I’ll try to write them down, even if it’s only a fragment, but if I’m really working on getting my technique together right before a concert or a series of concerts, I might not even write down everything I hear. The trumpet basically comes first because I’m known mainly as a trumpet player. So I usually spend more time writing when I have long stretches between concerts. I get into a two-day cycle when I stay up all night and sleep in the next day. It takes away from my trumpet chops, but during these long breaks, I do try to write everyday. I have note books that I keep everything from fragments to ideas in.WBGO: When you write for this quintet, do you write like Duke Ellington would write; do you write the part for that person?
TOM: Yes, I write for each individual. I try to find things that will make them excited. What makes it worthwhile for me is when the music comes alive while we are performing. That’s one of the beautiful things about Duke Ellington was that he wrote for each individual. That’s my basic motivation is to make people happy.
WBGO: That’s Prana. What is Prana?
TOM: It’s a Life Force. Its what keeps our lives basically moving. It’s part of Yoga breathing and I use it as a way to calm myself.
WBGO: I can imagine that for someone seeing you perform for the very first time, there could be a massive misunderstanding if they didn’t know something abput you before they came to the show. Because you seem to be completely engaged when the trumpet is in your mouth, and then when your solo is gone, you sort of move off to the side of the stage and are not making any kind of eye contact with any of the audience or the band members. Do you think that it is a massive mis-characterization to say that you are not engaged at that point?
TOM: I try to keep the engagement when I am playing, but when I’m not playing it is important, too. I mean that’s the whole reason for living. Long ago, I was introduced to the idea of keeping a groove going along with everything else in life that you are trying to do. I’m still trying to apply that idea. Someone once said: even when you are not practicing, you are practicing. While you are going for a walk you are learning about life; or reading a book – same thing. You can learn something everyday that could apply to your life whether it is musical or non-musical. As a musician, I tend to see everything in terms of music. But everything is related to cosmology and related to it.
WBGO: Tom, thanks for joining us.
TOM: Thank you; nice talking to you.
WBGO: We are looking forward now to hearing you and the quintet at The Village Vanguard.
“We have been criticized for pointing out that he has battled psychiatric illness for many years. It does not define him, either personally or creatively, but schizophrenia has been a shaping influence for much of his adult life. Schizophrenics never make any bones about it, and Harrell has even been known to joke about his condition, once commenting as he entered a hotel suite that there was a room for each of his personalities.” Richard Cook & Brian Morton’s The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD [Loc. cit.].As the years have moved along in Tom’s career, what was once quietly acknowledge and accepted among the community of musicians in which he performed, became a disclosed condition to the public in general through television interviews like the one with Charlie Rose on CBS’ 60 minutes and magazine articles such as the following one entitled Like Night and Day by Jonathan Eig which appeared in Esquire, December 1998.
© copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“TOM HARRELL, dressed all in black, stands in a dark corner of a crowded Chicago nightclub. Sometimes he prefers a closet, but tonight the corner will do. He's clearing the voices from his head, trying to stay cool. Don't worry, he tells himself over and over, be positive...believe in yourself...count your blessings....The banalities don't stick, but they help push aside the voices a bit, and now he is ready to go to work.
Harrell shuffles out of the darkness and onto the stage, where the four members of his band wait, and he begins shaking. His eyebrows twitch. His lips smack. He stares at the ground, trying hard not to make eye contact with his audience. He doesn't want to give the voices or the hallucinations a chance to pop back into his head. "I apologize for my lack of charisma," he once told a club full of people. As he raises his trumpet, the golden spotlight strikes stars on the horn's bell. Even as he puts the cold mouthpiece to his lips, his twitching never quite stops. He takes a deep breath, and for one frozen moment, all is quiet. Tranquility hangs on an unplayed note.
The trumpeter begins to blow, playing silky ribbons of sixteenth notes that rise and fall. Behind him, the band beats a latin-jazz rhythm. Then he tosses in a handful of slower, cloudier notes that curl and fade away.
Harrell is one of the finest jazz trumpeters in the world. He is also schizophrenic. Backstage after the set, he is impossible to talk to. He sits alone on a ragged sofa in a small dressing room. His wife, Angela, ushers me into the room and makes the introduction. I try small talk, but he is unable to speak. His head shakes, and his lips move as if he's trying to release trapped words."Jonathan plays the trumpet," Angela tells her husband, trying to break the ice.
I tell him that I would like to interview him at his home in New York.
He tries again to form sounds. Nothing. Fifteen seconds of silence pass, and I am tempted several times to fill the empty space with babble.
"Bring your trumpet," he finally says.
I arrive on a hot Friday afternoon in August, trumpet case slung over my shoulder. Harrell lives in Washington Heights, and his apartment has a gorgeous view of the George Washington Bridge, the Hudson River, and the Palisades. But on the day of my visit, as on most days, the curtains are drawn. The place smells of grilled steak, which Harrell eats, entirely without seasoning, at least once a day. He puts away his dishes and walks slowly out of the kitchen to shake my hand and lead me to a chair. Most of the walls are lined with dark wooden cabinets that hold Harrell's music. Each drawer contains the score for a different composition, and by a quick count, there are at least two hundred drawers.
After saying hello, Harrell vanishes for fifteen minutes, then suddenly joins me at a darkwood dining room table. He appears much as he did in the club: nervous, shaky, and reluctant or unable to communicate. He is dressed all in black, same as always, and he is even taller than I remembered. His shaggy hair and beard have begun turning gray. His lips are purple and moist, like thin slices of raw sirloin, and his pale-blue eyes match almost perfectly the clear sky beyond his curtained windows.
Even though there are no buildings within sight of the apartment, Harrell sometimes believes he is being watched. At other times, he believes his home has been bugged. Quite often, he hears voices. Tom Harrell did this to somebody. Tom Harrell did that to somebody, they say, and those voices sometimes hurl him deep into a ravine of guilt and depression. When the voices speak, or when visual hallucinations beset him, his shaking worsens. Angela advises me not to use a tape recorder during the interview and to be prepared to come back another day if he doesn't want to talk.
Tom Harrell was born in 1946 in Urbana, Illinois, and grew up in Los Altos, California. His father taught business psychology at Stanford, and his mother worked as a statistician. Tom topped his father's IQ of 146, and he early on showed extraordinary talent in music and art. By the time he was eight, he was writing and illustrating his own children's books, which revealed the work of a precocious, original mind. In one book, young Tom told the story of a little boy who goes to a doctor for treatment of a mosquito bite and gets diagnosed with 'scissor-birds, dog-turtles' and other animal hybrids that he invented.
It was his father's constant whistling and his impressive jazz record collection that inspired Tom to begin playing the trumpet. By the time he turned thirteen, he was jamming with professional bands around the Bay Area. When he was seventeen, he went off to Stanford, and it was at about that time that his parents and sister began to notice that the buoyancy was draining from his personality. He became surly and aloof, a social misfit, and, at one very low point, he tried to kill himself.When he was in his early twenties, Harrell was diagnosed with schizo-affective disorder, which combines the paranoia of schizophrenia with the wild mood swings of manic depression, and he was given drugs to help control the condition. The medication slowed his speech, gave him headaches, and robbed him of sleep, but he was able to carry on as a professional musician, working his way from band to band.
Only in the world of jazz, where abnormal behavior has always been the tradition, could Harrell fit so nicely. After all, Charles Mingus spent time in the mental ward at Bellevue, Bud Powell did his own tour of psychiatric hospitals, the great Sun Ra thought he came from another planet, and Thelonious Monk probably did.
Harrell has recorded a dozen albums for small record companies. But in the past two years, since he signed a contract with the RCA Victor label, he's begun to gain recognition outside the hardcore group of fans who had previously followed his work. The readers of Down Beat recently voted him the world's best trumpet player. With his major-label releases, most recently The Art of Rhythm, even the mainstream press has begun to take note.
"Pure melodic genius," declared one discerning newsmagazine.
And the melodies are the genius's own. Harrell prefers his original compositions to standards, He warns listeners to work as they listen, to attempt to understand the feelings behind his songs.
The musicians who have worked with Harrell report some odd moments as well as magical ones. In an airport, if the hustle and bustle become too much for him, he might wander off to a quiet spot in a parking garage and blow his trumpet until the noises in his head hush. Sometimes he will hear a chord in the hum of the refrigerator or the engine of a passing jet and work the rest of the day writing a composition based on what he has heard. Once, on a cab ride in Los Angeles with bandmate Gregory Tardy, Harrell began weeping uncontrollably because he was struck by the beauty of a tune on the cabbies radio. Tardy can't remember the song, but he says it was some Top Forty pop number he had heard a hundred times and never paid attention to before.
Angela travels with Harrell and helps keep him from getting distracted. His need for intense periods of quiet concentration guides almost every moment of his life. When he has a gig, he won't leave his apartment or his hotel room until it is time to play. He sends Angela to do the sound check and bring him food. Harrell says he feels awfully alone at times. He sometimes thinks life would be easier if he were to work full-time as a composer and arranger, because he wouldn't have to face the pressures of travel and three-set-a-night gigs. But Angela and his band-mates account for almost all the human companionship he's got, and he can't stand the thought of being isolated.
Once, a few years ago, after his medicine caused a toxic reaction and nearly killed him, Harrell stopped taking it. The results were fascinating and frightening. His moods changed more quickly and furiously than ever, from happy to sad, confident to insecure. His posture improved, his tremors vanished, and he became something close to affable. He would buy bags of groceries and leave them in front of his neighbors' doors as anonymous gifts. On the bandstand, when his turn came to solo, he would stun his audiences by scat singing in falsetto. His emergent personality was wonderful, and it was terrifying. He would go for five-hour walks in the middle of the night, and he would frequently leave all the taps in the apartment running, in tribute, he said, to the Water God.Harrell never quite looks me in the eye. He stares at his lap, hops quickly from one thought to the next, and raises his eyelids only briefly. At one point, he says he doesn't think he should go on speaking to me, because he feels tremendous guilt for not having been born black. Jazz is black music, he says, and it seems unfair for a white man to be celebrated for his work. He can't separate himself from these thoughts, and all my attempts to change the subject are in vain. He begins to cry, and he lets the tears roll into his beard. He excuses himself, and twenty minutes later he returns with a tall glass of milk and acts as if nothing had happened. He glances at my trumpet case and a book of music paper I have with me. "Do you compose?" he asks.
"No," I say. "But my teacher wants me to write a new melody based on the chords to 'Night and Day.' "
He looks at my weak attempt.
"Oh, this is really nice," he says. His voice is high and pinched in the throat, and my mind scrambles from one television cartoon character to another, trying to place it. "You have some nice ideas here,"
He is incapable of criticizing, except when it applies to himself, but we are off and running, at least, talking about flat nines and flat flat nines and some other nines I pretend to understand. He is most comfortable on the subject of music, about the lovely way Louis Armstrong used scat singing to show that words were not needed to communicate feelings, about how Miles Davis played many of the same rhythms as Armstrong yet cast them in darker colors, and about Charlie Parker's belief that great music is born when musicians forget their long hours of study at the moment of creation.
"You merge with the infinite and transcend your ego," he says, describing how it feels to play. He takes a long, shaky pause. "Sometimes it seems to flow without any conscious effort."All music has the human cry at its base, he says, and even the saddest songs can lead people out of the darkness of depression. "I think the more emotion you experience, the more you can bring to the music," he says. "Some people say you don't have to suffer to play music...." He takes another long pause. "I don't know, but, umm..." His eyebrows begin leaping wildly, his mouth moves in silence, and his head shakes side to side so much I begin to think he's stable now and the whole room is moving behind him. "That's a really difficult question. You don't want to be self-destructive. At the same time, sadness is a part of everyone's life, and music can express the sadness people are feeling and bring them together. You shouldn't hide from your feelings.
"Sometimes, I guess when I get paranoid, it can make me distracted," he continues. "But sometimes, if I feel really depressed, it can give me humility, which makes it sometimes easier to concentrate, which makes it easier to transcend my ego. I may be drawn to worrying because it's a form of excitement."
When Harrell runs out of words, he takes me into his music studio, a sound-proof extra bedroom with double-paned windows and closed curtains. There are dozens of tubes of lip balm and hundreds of sheets of handwritten music scattered about. He sits at his keyboard and stares at a work in progress for trumpet and strings.
"Play it," Angela gently requests.
The opening chords are very sad. The music moves slowly, by half steps and subtle shades. The key signature is in a constant state of flux, like a chameleon moving from plant to wall, sunlight to shade. Harrell's spine curls into a question mark. He stares straight ahead at the lightly penciled notes, concentrating intensely as his milk-white fingers move slowly over the keys. I hear dark holes without bottom and chaos brought barely under the control of the composer's hand. This is the source of the strength in Harrell's music. He shows us the darkness and confusion, and he makes beauty from it.
Harrell is at peace now. When he finishes, he looks at me and holds his gaze.
"That was so sad," I say.
He smiles, for the first time.
"Thanks," he says. He takes a long pause. The twitching has almost vanished.
"Wanna do 'Night and Day'?" he asks.”
To be continued in Tom Harrell Part 2 – A Retrospective and The Recordings
I always thought that Bix Beiderbecke was the saddest story in Jazz until I researched the life of Davy Tough for this JazzProfiles feature.
“Dave Tough was born in Oak Park, Illinois, the youngest child of James and Hannah Fullerton Tough, both of whom were born in Aberdeen, Scotland. He had two brothers, George and James, and a sister, Agnes. His father was a bank teller, who dabbled in real estate and the commodities market. His mother died, of apoplexy, in 1916, when he was nine, and in 1921 his father married a sister of his mother's. Tough continued to call her "aunt," even though she was now his stepmother, and this gave rise to half truth that he lived with his aunt and uncle. He went to Oak Park High School, but he never graduated. By the time he was fifteen or sixteen, he was playing drums and hanging out with the Austin High School Gang. Tough was already, as Art Hodes puts it, a "runner-around." He was also two people - the hard-drinking drummer and the bohemian, who read voraciously, did some painting and drawing, took language and literature courses at the Lewis Institute, and hung out at a night club called the Green Mask, where he accompanied poetry readings such as Max Bodenheim, Langston Hughes, and Kenneth Rexroth. His friend Bud Freeman says in his book "You Don't Look Like a Musician" Tough took him to a Cezanne show at the Chicago Art Institute.
Jess Stacy was in Chicago in the early thirties, and he remembers Tough. "He'd always had trouble with drinking," he said recently. "I used to see him all the time before I joined Benny Goodman, in 1935, and he was in terrible shape. He looked like a bum and he hung out with bums. He'd go along Randolph Street and panhandle, then he'd buy canned heat and strain off the alcohol and drink it-this being during Prohibition. I played with him in Goodman's band in 1938, right after Krupa left and Goodman was running through drummers a mile a minute. Goodman said to Tough one day just before show time, 'Hey, Davy, I want you to send me,' and Tough replied, 'Where do you want to be sent?' He was a brilliant little guy, and I always wondered if he wasn't torn between being a writer and being a drummer."
Half of Tough's career was over, and he didn't seem to have much to show for it. But this was deceptive. He certainly had helped inspire the great rhythmic drive of the Chicago players, and he must have helped shape whatever subtlety they had. He had worked his way through the styles of the New Orleans drummers Baby Dodds and Zutty Singleton, and, by ceaselessly experimenting, had become a first-rate, original drummer. 
He knew books and art, and this added stature and class to the popular image of the jazz musician as an uncouth primitive. His great gifts were far more visible during the last half of his career. Tommy Dorsey, starting his own band, hired Tough in 1936, and appears to have helped him back to some sort of normality. (Tough and his wife were divorced the same year.) He stayed with Dorsey for more than two years, lifting his soloists and giving what was basically a big Dixieland band a fresh and buoyant feeling. He also took on an advice-to-drummers column for the monthly music magazine Metronome. Much of what he wrote tends to be facetious, but it knocked out his peers and gave him the reputation of being a writer. He considers drummers and chewing gum:
Once in a while he would get down to business:
Shaw has said, “I first knew Davy in the thirties when he was with Tommy Dorsey, and we'd go up to Harlem to listen to music. He was a sweet man, a gentle man, and not easy to get to. He was shy and reclusive. He had great respect for the English language. He read a lot and I read a lot, so we had that in common. During the Second World War, he was in my Navy band, and we'd manage to get together once in a while 124 American Musicians and talk. He was an alcoholic, and, like all alcoholics, he always found things to drink. I'd assign a man to him if we had an important concert coming up-say, for the crew of an aircraft carrier-and that man would keep an eye on him all day. This was so he wouldn't get drunk and fall off the bandstand, which he had done a couple of times. I think he was the most underrated big-band drummer in jazz, and he got a beautiful sound out of his instrument. He tuned his drums, he tried to achieve on them what he heard in his head, as we all do, and I think he came as close as you can get. He refused to take solos. Whenever I pointed to him for twelve or eight or four bars, he'd smile and shake his head and go on playing rhythm drums."
The drummer Ed Shaughnessy, long in the "Tonight Show" band, hung around Tough when he was fifteen or sixteen and Tough was with Woody Herman. He once said of him, "No drummer could match his intensity. He used a heavy stick with a round tip, He had the widest tempo, the broadest time sense, and in that way he was like Elvin Jones. He was always at the center of the beat, even though he gave the impression he was laid back. He played loosely, with not much tension on the stick, and he tuned his drums loosely. He kept a glass of water and a cloth on the bandstand, and before each set he would dampen the cloth and wipe the foot-pedal head of his bass drum with a circular motion. That drumhead was so loose it almost had wrinkles in it. He told me he did this because he didn't want the bass drum to be in the same range as the bass fiddle. He didn't want the two to compete. And he tuned his snare and tom toms the same way, so that they were almost flabby. He was a master cymbal player-maybe the greatest of all time. He had a couple of fifteen-inchers on his bass drum, plus a Chinese cymbal and what we call a fast cymbal - a small cymbal you use for short, quick strokes. And he had thirteen-inch high-hat cymbals. He'd use his high hat, either half open or open-and-shut behind ensembles, and when things roared he would shift to the big, furry sound of the Chinese cymbal.
He had a very loose high-hat technique, and he was always dropping in off beats on it with his left hand. He often used cymbals for punctuation where other drummers used rim shots or tom tom beats. He told me he didn't want to interrupt the rhythmic wave. When he played, he looked sort of like a bird, his arms moving in birdlike arcs. But they moved as if he were playing under the water - not very heavy water. He was a surprisingly strong brush player, and he could easily carry a big-band number with brushes. He hated soloing. I remember in 1946, when he'd won the down beat poll and he was with Joe Marsala at Loew's State Theatre, and Marsala announced, 'We will now have a drum solo from Dave Tough, winner of the down beat Poll,' Davy looked like he was having his wisdom teeth pulled. He was always putting himself down, by saying things like 'I can't even roll on the goddam snare,' or, talking about bebop drumming, 'I can't change gears now and play the way you guys do.' He always liked everything that was new, though. He listened to all the young drummers, and he thought Max Roach was terrific."
The bassist Chubby Jackson worked beside Tough in the Herman band, and he spoke of him: "He was a champion of my life. We'd sit together on the bus between gigs and endlessly talk rhythm. In those days, there was great motivation between the drummer and the bass player, and the relationship could be like a happy marriage. He taught me to play non-metronomic time-that is, to play organized time. He said that human beings weren't metronomes, and drummers shouldn't be, either. Sometimes he would slow the beat down slightly so that the band would have a bigger sound, and sometimes he would speed up half a peg if things were getting sluggish. Or he'd hit five quarter notes in a row as a signal to the boys to pep up. He was the little general of that First Herman Herd. He did strange things to his cymbals. He'd remove all the sizzles except one or two from his Chinese cymbal, and he'd cut a wedge out of a ride cymbal to get a broader sound. He played differently behind each soloist. He'd say Bill Harris plays on the top of the beat, and Flip Phillips plays in the center of the beat-and he'd do specific things for each of them.
The sound of Tough's cymbals changed constantly in the background. The splashing opening high hat gave way to the shining ride cymbal (behind a clarinet), which gave way to a roaring Chinese cymbal (behind a trombone), which gave way to a tightfisted closed high hat, with clicking afterbeats struck on the high-hat post with one stick (behind a piano), which gave way to pouring half-open high-hat figures (behind a trumpet), and, finally, to the open high hat or Chinese cymbal (behind the closing ensemble). He used occasional, often indistinct accents on his snare drum and a steady panoply of jarring bass-drum accents. He created a ringing jubilance with his cymbals. They were also the canvas for the soloists to paint on. It was never clear whether his dislike of drum soloing-in a time when drum solos were the height of jazz fashion-was because he wasn't good at it (his solos, always short, generally consisted of rolling, with accents on the rims, and concluding cymbal splashes) or because he simply disapproved of the custom. Jimmy McPartland has said that Tough's beat was "relentless," and it was. There was no place for laggards or fakes in his musical world, and he would either change them or demolish them.
Tributes and Reflections about Davy from Burt Korall’s Drummin’ Men:
For example, when I brought Woody to the Philips label, everything was handled by Abe, including signing Herman's name to the agreement and then telling me, "Don't tell Woody the details of the contract, I'll handle that." When the band, whose record sales had been moribund for several years, had big success on Philips I'm convinced it was Turchen who talked Woody into leaving us to sign with Columbia, which now was interested in him after turning down the chance to sign him at the time I made my offer. If any money changed hands to effect that switch it went to Abe..jpg)
The album was titled "The Voice Is Rich," and I think it came off quite well and served its purpose.
The late Milt Bernhart was a gifted writer whose literary abilities nearly matched.jpg)
At one point Judy stared at her slim, hand-held mike for a couple of seconds, then treated it in a fashion so graphic that it brought a huge appreciative laugh from the audience. She offered a salacious grin in response.
Johnny Guarnieri could flat out play piano. I recall more than several evenings spent at the now-long-gone Tail of the Cock in Sherman Oaks, California, where Johnny gave lessons nightly on how to play solo piano.
Then we went to the bar to hear the next set. By the third tune, Guarnieri was turning it on. When he began a brilliant stride version of "Stealing Apples" Campbell could contain himself no longer and left me to stand directly behind Guarnieri to see exactly what the hell he was doing.
This was written in 2006 to a friend:
An online contributor once said of Miles Davis: "I only went to one of his concerts. Nina Simone was the opening artist. It was her famous 1959 Town Hall Concert--which was really Miles' concert. Nina was a revelation to everyone. Miles was a total s**t. He showed this receptive audience total contempt".
Les Koenig, a screenwriter and associate producer at Paramount Studios, found his motion picture career aborted by 1950s blacklisting. A fine writer and lover of music and the arts, he founded his own record label, Contemporary, and first found success with his Dixieland band of Walt Disney technicians, The Firehouse Five Plus Two.
Leonard Feather initiated a series of sessions in which a small group of some of us jazz regulars would meet in one of our homes to listen to and offer opinions on the newest record releases. It was a great way to keep abreast of what was happening, and among the participants was Koenig. It was his ear that I quickly began to trust when comments were offered, and his judgment that I invariably agreed with.
There was one session, however, that didn’t cause any worry about the time clock and was one of the easiest and best I was ever to be involved in. The final album Cannonball Adderley recorded for Mercury was done in Chicago with Adderley and the rest of Miles Davis’s sextet sans Miles. Adderley, John Coltrane, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb strolled into the studio on a frigid February night an hour past the scheduled recording time and walked out about four hours later after completing an entire album of six tunes, none of which required more than two takes.